Southeast Christian Church here, where pumping iron and praising the Lord go hand and hand. Amenities at the gym include 16 basketball courts and a Cybex health club, free to churchgoers, where the music is Christian...
It is possible to eat, shop, go to school, bank, work out, scale a rock-climbing wall and pray there, all without leaving the grounds.
In Glendale, Ariz., the 12,000-member Community Church of Joy, which has a school, conference center, bookstore and mortuary on its 187-acre property, has embarked on a $100 million campaign to build a housing development, a hotel, convention center, skate park and water-slide park, transforming itself into what Dr. Walt Kallestad, the senior pastor, calls a ''destination center.'' ...
The churches have even become alternative employers. At the Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston, a McDonald's will open this month, complete with a drive-in window and small golden arches. Part of its goal is to create jobs for young people and the elderly, while offering a predominantly middle-class black congregation another reason to linger on church grounds....
The church was deliberately designed like a mall. (The sanctuary is the anchor tenant.) Hallways 20 feet wide with curves enhance ''people flow,'' said Jack Coffee, a church elder and chairman of the building committee. Preschoolers frolic at a Disneyesque play land, with mazes. There is an education wing for Bible classes, a concert-hall-size atrium with glass elevators, crisscrossing escalators and giant monitors that itemize the day's offerings: meetings to help smokers quit, a cross-trainers minimarathon and pat the Bible classes for 6-month-olds....
Southeast Christian churchgoers speak of a 22,000-person family, and visitors are regaled with statistics: the coffeepot that serves 5,000 cups an hour, the 403 toilets. Southeast's size has spawned the invention of the Greenlee Communion Dispensing Machine, designed by Wilfred Greenlee, 79, a congregant. It can fill 40 communion cups in 2 seconds...
For Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Tex., attracting young congregants, and keeping them, has helped it grow from 30 families to 20,000 members in a dozen years. Fellowship offers a 40,000-square-foot youth center with a climbing wall and video arcade and is creating a lake to encourage father-son bass fishing...
Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Tex., has a youth center so elaborate that some have called it Preston World: 15 ball fields, a 1950's-style diner and a fitness center, as well as classrooms and a 7,000-seat sanctuary. It is adding a $19 million school, coffee shop, food court, student ministry center, youth building, an outdoor prayer walk, a chapel and an indoor commons, modeled on the idea of Main Street. ''We're not a large church,'' said Mike Basta, the executive pastor. ''We're a small town.''...
Brentwood Baptist in Houston also offers a full range of family options, often based on a political and social agenda. Besides its choir and Bible-study classes, it has housing for AIDS patients and a credit union...
Not incidentally, it gives the 2,000 or so Brentwood congregants who flock to church for more than 80 activities each evening -- like children's theater and adult computer classes -- an excuse to stick around. ''If you have to go home for dinner, you don't come back out,'' Pastor Ratliff said, referring in part to the city's vast commutes...
Even the water park, which will be part of an Olympic-size aquatic center, will have a Christian theme, with laser shows depicting Jonah and the whale and David and Goliath...
